Upcoming Dates
* Friday, December 18th: ALL KINDERS COME FROM 9:00AM to 12:20PM.
We will be having a Polar Express Day! Please come to school in your pajamas (with a jacket of course) and bring your favorite stuffed animal to school. We will pretend to be the children on the Polar Express Train and we will even get to eat cookies and have hot chocolate!
NOTE: If you are a Friday sharer, please bring your sharing the day before, on Thursday, December 17th to present.
* Monday, December 21st to Friday, January 1st: NO SCHOOL – Winter Vacation
Have a wonderful two week vacation!
* Monday, January 4th: School Resumes
Happy New Year!
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Dear Families,
It has been really really cold lately. Make sure to send your children in warm jackets and remember to label everything! We have a few items in the classroom that have no names and have not been claimed. I remind the children to wear their jackets on our way out to recess and lunch, but even then it is still cold! Stay warm! Also, some students are still unable to open their own snacks. Please put their snacks in something they can open themselves, such as a ziplock bag for crackers or cookies. Thank you!
Once you are on the Eaton campus, it would be nice to keep consistent rules with the regular day. Please help to keep your child accountable before and after school. One example is that we always walk on the blacktop. Please do not let your child run through the hallways or run to get into line in the morning, or run around after school. We have to use walking feet, except on the grass. Another example is to patiently wait in line for our turn. Please have your child line up in the morning in order of arrival. Please do not let them cut in line, and also help to remind them that it’s ok to be first or last. Finally, we remember to respect others. Make sure your child is keeping their hands and feet to themselves, and also using nice words to talk about others. Keeping these consistent rules inside and outside of school will help your child remember to follow Eaton rules.
Here are some highlights for the week:
• Star of the Week: Kumiko
• Language Arts: This week we started reading some Gingerbread Man stories. There are a lot of variations of the story, but we read the Gingerbread Man, Gingerbread Baby, and Gingerbread Friends. During our Friday centers, we made our own gingerbread men using white paint and brown paper. We also made a mini book about eating different body parts of the gingerbread man!
• Social Studies: We are continuing our 3-week Social Studies project on the holidays, seasons, and months. Also, almost all of us have some sight words memorized such as the, month, for, and is! It is really important that at this time of the year, the children begin mastered their handwriting of little and big letters.
• Writing: In our journals this week, we wrote a sentence about what we think of when we hear “December.” We illustrated our pictures and checked our handwriting. We are trying to get into the habit of using capitals, spaces, and periods! It is still hard for some students to remember to check their work!
• Math: This week we practiced counting using ordinal numbers, such as first, second, third, etc. We learned that we use ordinal numbers when we say the date, and when we interview our Star of the Week! We practiced counting different objects that were in order. We also talked about graphs, and answered questions using the words more, less, or favorite. A new concept we talked about is odd and even numbers. We learned that odd numbers are the ones that “don’t have a friend,” whereas even numbers get all paired up and all have friends!
• Art: Ms. Abada came to our classroom on Tuesday and told us a Shape story. We used different shaped sponges and different color paints to stamp a picture of our choice. Students used their creativity to stamp flowers, trees, trains, and other pictures! You will see these pictures in today’s Folder.
• Computer Lab: This week we learned a new software program called Kidspiration. This program is usually used for brainstorming ideas in older grades. For our lesson, we chose pictures to match the different months of the year. We had to think about different special days throughout the year and make sure our pictures fit the season or month. This lesson will continue next week.
• Library: Thank you for returning your library books and homework folders each Friday. Our class has been great about checking out new books each week! I still have to remind some children that library is for reading books and not for playing or interacting with friends!
Our classroom is decorated with different holiday projects! If you haven’t already, you can see photos of our December decorations in the “Photos” section of our website! Also in the “Photos” section, I added my dance group’s latest performance called “Life.” My dance group is called Eight Count, and we performed this routine at the last Sunday Service. This is just a fun celebratory piece and we were excited to actually have audience participation! Enjoy!
I can’t believe it is already the last week of school for 2009. I don’t know how time is flying by so quickly! Next week will be really busy for the kids as we will be finishing up our major projects. Your child will be bringing home the homework envelope with a new library book and journal, but next week there will be NO homework packet. Please return the envelope on Friday as usual.
Have a wonderful weekend and stay dry!
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